Okinawa karate does not belong to the Budo culture.
It is only to read carefully the writings of Miyagi, Mabuni and Funakoshi, that
are dicumentos that preserve the old culture of Ryukyu. There are no principles
of Budo there, but some of the ones Sun Tzu (Sunji) exposes in his work Art of
War (Bin Fa) summarized in the Bubishi of Okinawa.
The first masters who migrated to Japan were part of
a passive resistance to the domination of the island by the Japanese Empire.
Ryukyu's martial culture was shaped in Taoism; the Busaganashi symbol -
"Genbu" - which frames the Goju-ryu and the Go Kenki school, is a
traditional Taoist idol venerated by the navigators of Fujian associated to
constellation of the Great Bear, the Emperor of the Night. Miyagi, Mabuni,
Funakoshi, Gokenki and others, followers of the Sino-Okinawan tradition, never
accepted Japanese acculturation and discreetly rejected the doctrine of Budo.
In Japan, karate had a deliberate intention of cultural appropriation,
reconfiguring it in a more athletic form that became known as "Japanese
karate". This was led by the first Japanese masters, who came from
Butokukai, who adopted karate. Since then, there are today to karate: "Okinawa
karate" and "Japanese karate."
Okinawa karate has as its older register of real origin
a poorly organized collection of martial teachings and medical care in a popularly
book known as "Bubishi". This work is apocryphal, probably composed
by several authors at different times, and is based on Taoist, not Buddhist, philosophy.
This manual belonged to a school in Fujian that was transferred for political
reasons to Naha around 1828. All this doctrine is developed around the
alchemical doctrine of Dan (the
Universal Elixir) and the three Dantians
known as Sanguan Santian
("Doctrine of the Three Portals") or simply Santian - "sanchin" in dialect uchinan.
Taoists were very concerned about health and
longevity, and believed that this was due to an "elixir of life," and
that it was possible to extract this energy from the universe through
meditation and certain movements that would connect the mind to the cosmos, potencializing
this energy in the body through certain chemicals. The Hsing-I expression had
this meaning: "to extract by the mind the essence of things”, the
foundation of Taoist alchemy. The essence to be extracted is Dan, the Elixir, which gives life,
animation and movement to all things, the "philosophical mercury" of
the Arab and European alchemists.
In Taoism it was taught that there were three
centers of concentration of Dan in
the body - the Dantian - species of
batteries that redistribute Dan to
the whole body. These Dan are: Xia (lower, vegetative, nursery and
reproductive), Zong (middle, thymic,
animic) and Shang (upper, coronary,
transpersonal, astral). They correspond precisely to the vegetative, animal,
and intellectual souls of Platonism. The Santian
is energized through breathing, in fact, Taoist meditation is a way of using
mind controlled breathing to pump cosmic energy into the Dantian. This was the meaning of the Sanchin = Santian form, an active meditation exercise, but today practiced
within a statute completely contrary to the original teaching and purpose.
Thus, instead of energizing the Dantian,
the current practice of the Sanchin by the Goju-ryu sect exhausts them (which,
in fact, is the opinion of TCM physicians), affecting global health in the long
run.
This meaning of the Sanchin / Santian was well known to Chinese masters and ryukans in
the 19th century, before it was appropriated by not initiated people in Chinese
martial culture, who today literally translate Sanchin as "three
battles" with equally laughable semantic attributions. Itosu sought to
give the karate he created, a new mentality based on technique and ergonomic
gains, depriving all Taoist philosophy of art he had created to discipline the
restless teenagers of Okinawa. He was aware that he was in a new world,
dominated by Western science and mechanization of society, on an island that
had only recently come out of the feudal regime. Itosu sought to insert his
creation in this new paradigm. The romantic nature man (revived as neurosis by
Oyama, Nakamura, Yamaguchi and other solar heroes of the new age of the film
media) was replaced by man-machine, cyborgs hauled by super-athletic
technologies.
Sadly, the new masters, wanting to give a painting
of tradition to karate, invented impossible connections and the result was the
disaster of the current karate, divided into sects that ignore their real
origins. This is very evident in the modern Goju-ryu, now a religious
fundamentalist sect. The myth of the hero was incorporated into the Sanchin
kata, with its incredible and frightening ibuki, epic muscle contractions, and
the future dilation of the ascending aorta, which tragically ended the
adventure of the nature man who believed in his supernatural energy.
Contrary to popular belief, kempo / karate was not
meant to train warriors, but to keep the body and mind healthy. It was born
from the observation of a 14th-century Chinese physician - Hua To - who
recommended to the emperor to exercise the population, for he found a great timeless
truth: "sedentariness is the mother of all diseases." The best way to
engage in exercise motivationally is like dancing or drama, so imitating animal
movements and how they fight has generated exercises that have become very
popular and stimulated the creation of martial arts in China. In the more
general context, this has become a culture of good health and physical
disposition for work and for the defense of the property.
